| Description | These registers of licences to drive motor vehicles are an accrual to the Oldham County Borough archive. They were created by the Council under the Motor Car Act 1903, which introduced motor vehicle registration and driver licensing. From 1921, under the Roads Act 1920 local authorities acted as agents for the Minister of Transport. This continued until the Vehicle and Driving Licences Act 1969 transferred registration and licensing responsibility to the new Driver and Vehicle Licensing Centre (DVLC - later DLVA), Swansea. The fate of many locally held records arising from this change, concurrent with local goverment re-organisation, is unclear. Records created under the 1920 Act should have been regarded as Public Records, under the Public Records Act, 1958. Those created under the 1903 Act are properly records of Oldham Borough Council, as the registration authority. A copy letter within CBO/3/1/6/3 indicates that it, and presumably the other 39 volumes, were still held locally in 1972. However, these records must have gone out of Borough custody for some years, as in 1983 they were presented by the DVLC to the Kithead Trust, a Droitwich based charity and 'a national transport archive'. They were deposited at Oldham Local Studies and Archives by the Trust in 1993. The registers record in numerical sequence the licence number issued, full name and address of the licensee, whether issued for a motor car and/or motor cycle, date of grant and expiration of licence, and particulars of renewals and endorsements. These common form volumes are indexed by driver surname. Interruptions to the numerical sequence indicate that a few registers are missing. Licence numbers 1-1230; 4760-4826 and 16894-21662 are missing from this series. See CBO/3/1/5/14 for the earlier volume in this series, covering 1903-1907. |